Category Archives: Brew Kit

At the moment I’m malt extract brewing (full mash takes a little bit more space and time than I currently have available) so my brewkit is fairly straight forward.

I have a 15L stock pot (one of these) in which, on the big ‘wok burner’ in the middle of our range cooker, I can boil 11 or 12 L of liquid with enough headspace to avoid boil overs.

I cool in the kitchen sink next to it and then decant into one of a variety of 25L fermentation buckets acquired over the years. At the moment my fermentation is done using the water bath technique – I have a garden trug into which I put the filled FV and then fill with water up to around the liquid line.

I have an inexpensive aquarium heater (like this) which then gets stuck to the inside of the trug to keep the water warm. This means that I don’t have to immerse the heater in the beer itself (which saves loads of cleaning issues) and this comfortably keeps the beer constant in the low 20s Centigrade.

If I’m doing a secondary fermentation I rack off into a spare fermentation bucket, or otherwise into a bottling bucket with the priming sugar solution and bottle straight from there.

A while ago I managed to acquire a second-hand four drawer metal filing cabinet which sits out in the garage and I have discovered it will take five rows of seven bottles in each drawer. So allowing for wastage and tastage that’s pretty much one brew run in each drawer, allowing me to have four different beers available all the time. An empty drawer is my trigger that it’s time for another brew day!